The Illegality of Article 7 of the Jewish Nation-State Law: Promoting Jewish Settlement As a National Value

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The Illegality of Article 7 of the Jewish Nation-State Law: Promoting Jewish Settlement As a National Value ADALAH POSITION PAPER March 2019 The Illegality of Article 7 of the Jewish Nation-State Law: Promoting Jewish Settlement as a National Value This position paper details the implications of Article 7 of The Basic Law: Israel – The Nation State of the Jewish People (hereinafter: the Law, the Basic Law, the Jewish Nation-State Law), enacted on 19 July 2018, on land and housing policy in two areas: inside Israel and in the 1967 Occupied Territories. Main provisions of the Jewish Nation-State Law1 Article 1 states that the Land of Israel (“Eretz Yisrael”) is the historic national home of the Jewish people, in which the State of Israel was established; the State of Israel is the national state of the Jewish people, in which it exercises its natural, cultural, and historic right to self-determination. It adds that the right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people. Article 2 sets forth the symbols of the state, all specifically Jewish in character. Article 3 defines the capital of Israel as Jerusalem, which includes occupied East Jerusalem. Article 4 states that the official language of the state is Hebrew, demoting Arabic, which was previously a second official language, to a language with an undefined “special status”. Article 5 establishes that immigration leading to automatic citizenship is exclusive to Jews. Article 6 provides that the state will strengthen ties between the state and Jewish people around the world, and preserve the latter’s cultural, historic, and religious heritage in the Diaspora. Article 7 provides that the state views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and will act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation. Background The Jewish Nation-State Law sets forth the constitutional order of Israel and articulates the ethnic- religious identity of the state as exclusively Jewish. It is the “law of laws”, capable of overriding any ordinary legislation. It alters the constitutional framework of the state, making changes that violate established international norms: there is no democratic constitution in the world that designates the constitutional identity of the state on racial grounds, as serving one ethnic group.2 While the state’s policy of discrimination and racism against Palestinians has existed since 1948, there is a major difference between discriminatory and racist practices and the codification of these policies in a new Basic Law with constitutional status. The law lends discriminatory policies against Palestinians greater legitimacy and requires the executive, judiciary and other authorities to implement them under the rule of law. The law also reduces the very grounds on which discrimination can be challenged under Israeli law. 1 See the translation of the law to English (unofficial) on the website of the Knesset: https://knesset.gov.il/laws/special/eng/BasicLawNationState.pdf 2 Adalah petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court on 7 August 2018 to challenge the constitutionality of this new Basic Law, on behalf of the High Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel, the Joint List of Arab political parties, and the National Committee of Arab Mayors. HCJ 5866/18, The High Follow-up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel v. The Knesset (pending). P.O. Box 8921 Haifa 31090 Israel Tel: (972)-4-950-1610 Fax: (972)-4-950-3140 حـــيــفا 31090 ، ص.ب 8921 هــاتــف 0 1 6 1 0 5 9 -04 فاكس 9503140 04- ח י פ ה 31090 , ת . ד. 1 2 9 8 ט ל פ ו ן 0 1 6 1 0 5 9 04- פ ק ס 9503140 04- Email: [email protected] http://www.adalah.org The law contains no commitment to democratic norms, or any guarantee of the right to equality, or prohibition of discrimination on the basis of race, nationality, ethnicity or any other category for all people living under Israeli sovereignty. Indeed, it does not even define its citizenry, referring instead to the Jewish people as its subject, and defining sovereignty and democratic self-rule as belonging solely to the Jewish people, wherever they live around the world. Further, the law does not define the borders of the State of Israel, but its implications seemingly extend to the 1967 Occupied Territories and the Jewish settlements located there. For all of these reasons, the law bears distinct characteristics of apartheid. Article 7 – Racial Discrimination in Land and Housing Article 7 of the Jewish Nation-State Law provides that, “The State views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value and will act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.” Article 7 constitutionally entrenches racial discrimination and exclusion in relation to matters of “Jewish settlement”, including land allocation, housing policy, planning and construction, funding for local authorities, and land and housing-related financial incentives. Read in conjunction with Article 1 of the Law, which defines the Land of Israel (“Eretz Yisrael”) as the historic national home of the Jewish people, and limits the right to self-determination in the State of Israel to the Jewish people, Article 7 will expand the illegal settlement enterprise in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and in the Golan Heights, in violation of international law. In accordance with this article, the State of Israel will now constitutionally act as a settlement movement, similar to the Jewish Agency, the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish National Fund. “Jewish Settlement” in Practice in Israel Before the enactment of the Jewish Nation-State Law, the term “Jewish settlement” did not appear in any Israeli legislation. However, the consistent policy of state institutions on land and planning has always been, and remains, discriminatory, racist, exclusionary, and segregationist, and calibrated to promote “Jewish settlement” in practice. The result of this policy has been decades of massive land expropriations from Palestinian citizens of Israel; the designation of this land for the exclusive use of the Jewish population, resulting in the creation of segregated housing, towns and villages; the reduction of the living and development areas allocated to the Arab population and Arab towns; and the emergence of a planning regime that systematically discriminates against Palestinian citizens. Discriminatory Land Laws and Practices Land Expropriation: A series of extremely arbitrary, discriminatory laws led to the expropriation of 40 to 60 percent of the land held by Palestinian citizens of the state.3 These laws include The Land (Acquisition for Public Purposes) Ordinance, 1943, used to carry out many of the expropriations that led to the bloody Land Day protests by Arab citizens in 1976, during which six people were killed; The Absentees’ Property Law (1950); The Land Acquisition (Validation of Acts and Compensation) Law, 1953; and The Negev Land Acquisition Law (the Peace Agreement with Egypt), 1980, pursuant to which tens of thousands of dunams were confiscated, mostly from Arab Bedouin living in the Naqab (Negev) desert in southern Israel. Segregation: Most towns and villages in Israel are segregated on the basis of nationality. According to official figures from 2017, there are 928 localities defined as Jewish and 132 as Arab.4 Of the Jewish 3 Oren Yiftachel and Alexander (Sandy) Kedar, “On Power and Land: The Israeli Land Regime,” 16 Theory and Criticism 67, 79 (2000) (hereinafter: Yiftachel and Kedar). 4 Central Bureau of Statistics Statistical, Abstract of Israel 68 (2017). Table 17 of Chapter 2 is available at the following link: http://www.cbs.gov.il/reader/shnaton/templ_shnaton.html?num_tab=st02_17&CYear=2017. 2 localities, 715 are kibbutzim, moshavim and community towns, entrance to which is restricted by discriminatory ‘admissions’ committees.5 In practice, therefore, Palestinian citizens of Israel cannot lease or purchase land in hundreds of towns in the state. Reduction of Jurisdictional Areas of the Arab towns and villages: The redrawing of jurisdictional maps following the establishment of Israel in 1948 resulted in a 64% reduction of the jurisdictional area of the existing Arab towns and villages.6 Today, the jurisdictional areas of Arab towns and villages together cover less than 3% of the state’s land area,7 while Palestinian citizens constitute around 20% of the population. As a result, population density in Arab localities has skyrocketed eleven-fold since 1948. The Bedouin in the Naqab are a particularly vulnerable group likely to be particularly affected by the implementation of Article 7 of the Law. The consistent ‘Judaization’ policy adopted by successive Israeli governments towards the Naqab, the ancestral land of Bedouin citizens of Israel, has been manifested in: the forced displacement of thousands of Bedouin living in villages that are “unrecognized” by the state; the reduction of the Bedouins’ living space by forced “urbanization”; the establishment of new, segregated Jewish towns, villages, and “individual farms”; and the implementation of massive so-called ‘development plans’ located in areas so as to further dispossess Bedouin of their land. The net result of this policy is that today, the jurisdictional area of all the currently-recognized Bedouin towns and village in the Naqab constitutes only 1% of the total area of the Be’er Sheva District, despite the fact that Bedouin citizens constitute 35% of the district’s total population (approximately 255,000 people).8 There are today 127 towns and villages in the Be’er Sheva district that are defined as Jewish, compared to just 18 recognized Bedouin localities.9 The Implications of Article 7 in Israel Article 7 contradicts Israeli Supreme Court case law, notably the Qa’adan decision.10 In Qa’adan, the Supreme Court ruled that the state must treat its citizens based on the principle of equality, and prohibited discrimination in land allocation and housing. In this landmark decision, the Court rejected the principle of “Jewish settlement” as a justification for discrimination.11 Article 7 of the Jewish Nation- State Law, however, encourages the state to discriminate based on national belonging in land settlement issues.
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